A disgruntled passenger managed to claim full refunds on all of his train tickets for a year. Ed Wise, 29, predicted train delays on Avanti West Coast meaning that every ticket he booked in 2023 was refunded. He believes he has saved at least £1,000 in less than three years since he started planning for delays.
Avanti West Coast offers customers, 25% off for a 15 minute delay, 50% off for a 30 minute delay and a full refund for delays of an hour or more. Wise, who writes the personal finance newsletter Bunce with colleague Joe Manktelow-Pimm, said he paid “those parasitic Avanti vampires zero” and “rode for free”. He said he began planning for delays after returning from a holiday in Italy, where he booked equivalent journeys for much cheaper prices.
Wise said: “I was furious at how woefully inefficient and expensive UK trains were.” Even after buying a railcard, using ticket splitting and booking trips to cheaper stations, he found he was still paying a high amount and contending with delays. He used three main factors to predict when trains would be delayed, which were strike action, planned engineering works and extreme weather.
Strike action means operators are hit by staff shortages, and Wise found there was normally a knock-on effect of several days before and after the planned action. Trade unions must give two weeks’ notice before planned industrial action, which Wise used as advance warning of delays. Trains are sometimes delayed deliberately to allow .